Alice Randall (born Detroit, Michigan) is an American author and songwriter. Randall grew up in Washington, D.C.. She attended Harvard University, where she earned an honors degree in English and American literature, before moving to Nashville in 1983 to become a country songwriter. Randall is the first black woman in history to write a number one country song.
She currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee and is married to attorney David Ewing. She is a writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt University and teaches courses including a seminar on the country music lyric in American literature.
Ada's Rules: A Sexy Skinny Novel
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Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; 1 edition (December 24, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1608199495
ISBN-13: 978-1608199495
Ada Howard, the wife of the preacher at Nashville’s Full Love Baptist
Tabernacle, has a whole lot of people to take care of. There’s her husband,
of course, and the flock that comes with him, plus the kids at the day care
where she works, two grown daughters, and two ailing parents. It’s no wonder
she can’t find time to take care of herself. And her husband’s been so busy
lately, she’s suspicious some other woman may be taking care of him . . .
Then it comes: the announcement of her twenty-five-year college reunion in
twelve months’ time, signed with a wink by her old flame. Ada gets to
thinking about the thrills of young love lost, and the hundred or so pounds
gained since her college days, and she decides it’s high time for a health
and beauty revival. So she starts laying down some rules. The first rule is:
Don’t Keep Doing What You’ve Always Been Doing. And so begins a long journey
toward a new look and a new perspective—on what Ada wants, and on what she’s
always had.
Why Adasize, book trailer Ada's Rules
The
Diary of B. B. Bright, Possible Princess
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by Alice Randall, Caroline Randall Williams
Reading level: Ages 8 and up
Hardcover: 292 pages
Publisher: Turner (September 25, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1618580159
ISBN-13: 978-1618580153
Nominated for a 2013 NAACP Image Awards, Outstanding Literary Work
Categories: Youth/Teens
A lively tale of one young woman’s adventure to pass her Official Princess
Test, discover a means of escape from her island, and reveal her true
destiny.
Thirteen-year-old orphan Black Bee Bright (B. B. for short) is funny,
quirky, precocious, and adventurous. But B. B. has a secret. She’s captive
on an island in “the middle of very tropical nowhere” because she’s forced
to hide her true identity as a royally born princess from her parents’
enemies in Raven World. B. B. must find a way to escape to “the Other World”
where there are best friends and cool clothes, but she can’t escape the
island until she passes her Official Princess Test and undertakes a
dangerous journey alone to the East side of the island, where eight
princesses must help her discover what it truly means to be a princess.
Rebel Yell: A Novel
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Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (September 29, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1596916680
ISBN-13: 978-1596916685
Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
Abel Jones Jr., a civil rights lawyer’s son turned black Washington neo-con,
has met an unlikely end: collapsing at the Rebel Yell dinner theater,
surrounded by actors in Confederate regalia, with his white second wife at
his side. Hope Jones Blackshear, Abel’s first wife and mother of his only
son, is left confounded by the turn his life took in his later years.
Sharing a drink after the funeral with Abel’s old friend Nicholas Gordon,
Hope lets herself reminisce about first meeting Abel at Harvard, and their
early married days as a foreign service couple in Manila and Martinique. But
her own version of history is altered by that of Nicholas, a dandified Brit
who seems to know more than he lets on. To fully understand the story of
Abel Jones, for her own sake and that of their teenage son, Hope journeys
from Nashville to Rome, seeking the connection between the Abel she loved, a
child of Southern terror in the sixties, and the Abel who became a White
House watchdog of global terror, driven to measures Hope could never have
imagined.
The work of one of our gutsiest writers, Rebel Yell is a novel of resilient
love, political intrigue, and family secrets, steeped in our country’s
racial history and framing our unique political moment.
Pushkin and the Queen of Spades: A Novel
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Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (May 4, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0618433600
ISBN-13: 978-0618433605
Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1 inches
Windsor Armstrong is a polished, Harvard-educated African American professor
of Russian literature. Her son, Pushkin X, is an exceedingly famous pro
football player, an achievement that impresses his mother not at all. Even
more distressing, however, her beloved son has just become engaged to a
gorgeous white Russian émigré who also happens to be a lap dancer.
For Windsor this predicament is no laughing matter. Determined to get to the
bottom of it, she embarks on a journey into her own rich past: to her Motown
childhood, where the Temptations danced across the stage and love came
disguised as a sharply dressed gangster; to Harvard, where she endured the
humiliation of being an unwed black teen mother; to St. Petersburg, where
the verses of the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, great-grandson of an
African slave, moved through her head as she made love to her own white
Russian. The urge to protect her son has been Windsor’s only goal, but as
she draws ever closer to the secret that has cast a shadow over her life,
the identity of her son's father, she discovers that the half-lies she has
fed her boy don’t add up to the beauty of the truth.
Balancing sharp-witted humor with profundity, sexiness with psychological
depth, this is an exhilarating ride straight through the racially divided
heart of contemporary America , which also probes the universal question of
what it means to be a good mother. Pushkin and the Queen of Spades is a
provocative, enormously entertaining novel that will change the landscape of
literary fiction.
The Wind Done Gone: A Novel
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Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition edition (June 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 061810450X
ISBN-13: 978-0618104505
Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
In a brilliant rejoinder and an inspired act of literary invention, Alice
Randall explodes the world created in Margaret Mitchell’s famous 1936 novel,
the work that more than any other has defined our image of the antebellum
South. Imagine simply that the black characters peopling that world were
completely different, not egregious, one-dimensional stereotypes but fully
alive, complex human beings. And then imagine, quite plausibly, that at the
center of this world moves an illegitimate mulatto woman, and that this
woman, Cynara, Cinnamon, or Cindy -- beautiful and brown -- gets to tell her
story.
Cindy is born into a world in which she is unacknowledged by her
plantation-owning father and passed over by her mother in favor of her white
charges. Sold off like so much used furniture, she eventually makes her way
back to Atlanta to take up with a prominent white businessman, only to leave
him for an aspiring politician of her own color. Moving from the Deep South
to the exhilarating freedom of Reconstruction Washington, with its thriving
black citizenry of statesmen, professionals, and strivers of every
persuasion, Cindy experiences firsthand the promise of the new era at its
dizzying peak, just before it begins to slip away.
Alluding to events in Mitchell’s novel but ingeniously and ironically
transforming them, THE WIND DONE GONE is an exquisitely written, emotionally
complex story of a strong, resourceful black woman breaking away from the
damaging world of the Old South to emerge into her own, a person capable of
not only receiving but giving love, as daughter, lover, and mother. A
passionate love story, a wrenching portrait of a tangled mother-daughter
relationship, and a book that gives a voice to those history has silenced,
THE WIND DONE GONE is an elegant literary achievement of significant
political force and a novel whose time has finally come.
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Black Women and Fat
By Alice Randall
Published: May 5, 2012
"FOUR out of five black women are seriously overweight. One out of four
middle-aged black women has diabetes. With $174 billion a year spent on
diabetes-related illness in America and obesity quickly overtaking smoking
as a cause of cancer deaths, it is past time to try something new."
